


Don't You Forget About Me (You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone)

by gilligankane



Category: Pitch Perfect (2012)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 12:09:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/585275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gilligankane/pseuds/gilligankane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jesse has always believed in fairy tales. He has always believed that good conquers evil, that princes can slay a dragon with one sword blow, and most importantly, that love is the solution to any problems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't You Forget About Me (You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone)

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired and beta'd by Kay.

He finds it by accident.

At least, he’s sure that she doesn’t _mean_ for him to find it. He’s not sneaking around and poking through her stuff and if she asks, he’ll swear it to his last breath, but he still finds it. Shoved between “Mamma Mia” and the “Bring It On” Collection, both things he thinks used to belong to Chloe, he finds the bus ticket in a plain envelope.

Jesse sits on the arm of the couch heavily, feeling it creak under his weight. He turns the envelope over in his hands and opens the flap, peering at the ticket with burning eyes.

He can’t find the date of departure and he really, really doesn’t want to look for it. All he sees before he closes the envelope is that it’s got Beca’s name printed at the top and it hasn’t been used.

Jesse shoves it back into the DVD shelf, the bottom row where Beca keeps the DVDs she picked up during college and her year living with Chloe, and he stares at it so long that the seafoam blue DVD cover washes out into something else.

But then his phone rings and Benji is calling to tell him he’s late and it’s not until he’s trying to hail a cab that he notices he’s bleeding from one finger.

He’s never been able to avoid papercuts.

*

Jesse has always believed in fairy tales. He has always believed that good conquers evil, that princes can slay a dragon with one sword blow, and most importantly, that love is the solution to any problems.

Maybe it’s because of his parents’ fairy tale-like romance. Maybe it’s because his older cousins sat him down and made him watch the Disney Princess movies at every family gathering. Maybe it’s the 80’s power ballads. Whatever it was, Jesse believed in the happy endings, in dreams becoming realities, and in the proven method where good guys get the girl simply because they’re good.

He knew that the Bellas winning Nationals would be the perfect ending to their story, and he wanted that for them, he really did. He wanted it for Beca because someone like her, someone so good underneath it all, had to have something waiting for them at the end of their story. They deserved it. _Beca_ deserved it.

Beca, despite her bad attitude and her general lack of knowledge of all the things he loves, deserved to win. Her smile was good and her intentions were good and she was everything Jesse had been looking for. He could be the sweet to her mean. She could be his daily dose of reality. There was no way it couldn’t work and he was going to make her see that. It led to juice pouches and movies in the quad and her being arrested and getting pissed at him for calling her dad. It led to her getting pissed at him for trying to stick up for her and one epic movie romance moment as he lifted his fist, Judd Nelson-style, into the air as she sang him his favorite song.

And when the Bellas were named champions – how could they not be? They sang Simple Minds, for Hughes’ sake – he couldn’t stop grinning widely, despite Benji’s good-natured punch to the shoulder. They won. They battled the forces of evil – a mix of Aubrey’s ambition, a decade of awful music, Bumper’s general douchebaggery, and all the odds – and came out on top. They pulled the sword from the stone and slayed the metaphorical dragon. Beca wasn’t a princess, but as he climbed over the auditorium seats to get to her, her smile outshining the stage lights, he figured it’s all right; she still got the guy.

They still got a happy ending.

He kissed her and he _swore_ he saw fireworks.

*

Here’s the problem with fairy tales: _And they lived happily ever after._

Here’s the problem with real life: _They don’t_.

*

After it ended, Jesse was unsure of what came next. When the curtain closed and the screen faded to black and he was signing a lease agreement with Benji for an apartment over the summer that was only two blocks from where Beca was going to be staying with Chloe, he was unsure of what the next part was.

Theoretically, there wouldn’t be anything _new_ to be unsure of. It was supposed to be about the same, but with more kissing.

Realistically, this was the first big relationship he’s been in where the girl he’s dating is actually dating him too, and he was terrified he was going to mess it up.

But he wanted it, so bad. He wanted the next steps. He wanted arguing over where to put the towels when they moved into their first apartment. He wanted the first big make-up after their first big fight as a couple. He wanted lazy Sunday morning movie marathons. He wanted to curl up on the couch while he scored movies and Beca mixed tracks. He knew that was kind of impossible, but he wanted that feeling and that security, and he wanted to have to yell at Beca because she wasn’t wearing socks even though she knew that grossed him out. He wanted black shutters and a white picket fence and a red door like his parents’ and maybe a dog but he wasn’t that picky.

Beca’s face whenever he said the word ‘future’ stopped him from saying it, but it didn’t stop him from wanting it.

He just figured that when you love someone enough and you do the right things, the future would fall into place without too much effort.

*

So Jesse steps back and tries to figure out what he’s doing wrong. Beca is interning her senior year at a music studio that’s in the middle of a huge push to have their small production firm absorb another small firm, and if she notices that he pulls away from their hugs first and that he doesn’t needle her to watch another stupid singing competition on TV, she doesn’t say anything. She gives him that vague ‘leave me alone’ smile she sometimes has and asks if he can shut the door so she can make a few calls without Christina Aguilera’s voice in the background.

He does the same things he’s always done. When she gives him that smile, he smiles back even wider, humming the Star Wars theme under his breath just to annoy her. Jesse catches her rolling her eyes just as the door clicks shut and it feels normal. It feels right. It feels like their routine.

Then he sits down to watch his show and his eyes drift past the television screen to the DVDs and he feels his throat tighten. He looks back to make sure the door is still shut and scrambles forward, pulling almost the entire shelf down.

The envelope is still there, sandwiched between two movies he knows that Beca knows he would never go near. He opens it again and studies it. It’s for a bus company out of Massachusetts and he frowns, wondering what’s there that Beca would run to. He thinks about it for so long that his show is halfway over before he blinks himself back to attention, slipping the ticket behind the “Mamma Mia” DVD case just in time.

“What are you doing?” Beca asks, her voice rising higher than normal. Jesse watches her eyes scan through the movies and her shoulders tighten.

 _She’s looking for the ticket_ , he realizes. _She’s worried I found it_.

Beca is still waiting for an answer, so Jesse shrugs and tips his head to one side, grinning widely. “Wanna watch ‘Bring It On’ and throw popcorn at the screen?”

Beca rounds the couch and kneels down next to him, her fingertips brushing against the plastic covered cases. He notices, for the first time, the fading lettering in the corner that spells out something he can’t really make out. B-Something. “No,” she finally says. “But we can make popcorn and throw it at the TV when the judges give their opinions?”

Jesse is already stacking DVDs and shoving them hastily onto the shelf, kissing Beca quickly as he rolls past her before rising to his feet.

As the popcorn pops, he goes over an arrangement in his head, trying to score the moment in a movie when the guy stands forlornly in his kitchen as he watches his girlfriend sorrowfully stare at the mangled versions of Abba, destroyed by Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan too long.

*

The first year of their relationship was tough. It’s tough to start a relationship on such a high note, he figured. Every moment after that was going to be a little less exciting, a little less memorable.

It was tough when Jesse tried to crash Beca’s lunch with her dad. It was tough when Jesse didn’t get why Beca didn’t want to meet his parents right away.

It was tough when Beca showed up in the middle of the night with a suitcase and her overnight bag, eyes rimmed red. It was tough moving her into his smaller-than-a-dorm bedroom as Beca fought with her landlord about cutting her some slack on the fee for breaking her lease. It was tough trying to get to her tell him what happened with Chloe and why they stopped talking and why Beca kept talking about blowing up the state of Massachusetts in her sleep.

But he tried. He stayed optimistic. He pulled the covers off of Beca when she didn’t want to go to work. He walked her home from her late night coffee barista shift when she didn’t want to walk alone. He played her scores as she brushed her teeth until she laughed so hard she spit toothpaste foam at him.

The first year was tough and there never was another moment like the first, but they still had their fun. He could count more laughs than fights and he knew they were the envy of his family and his friends.

So maybe their story wasn’t over yet and that kiss was a middle, something to keep the viewer interested, something to give them to cling to. And sometimes he pushed too hard (her relationship with her dad was still fragile, _is_ still fragile) and sometimes he just didn’t get it (it was just lunch with his parents and they’re about as harmless as bunnies).

He didn’t think the story was over yet.

*

The more Jesse thinks about it, the more he thinks it might be over.

He’s trying to put his finger on it, but he just can’t. He can’t pin down exactly when it was that he started feeling more like he was living with his best friend and less like he was living with his girlfriend. The ticket was just the catalyst to a greater thought, the kind that requires a background of strings and deep, dark notes on a baby grand piano.

He knows some things happen with comfort: brushing your teeth and peeing with the door open and being stuck on the couch with the flu, a mountain of tissues surrounding you. But when he looks at his parents and his older brothers and their wives, and he looks back at Beca, he doesn’t see that same spark when he kisses her. He kisses her hello and he kisses her goodbye and sometimes, but not as often, there’s a spark that pulls him back for longer kisses.

Benji gives him a strange look over his Battleship board. “You okay?”

Jesse starts. “What?”

“I asked if you were okay,” Benji repeats.

“Oh, yeah,” Jesse says, nodding. “Yeah. Uh, E5?”

Benji groans. “My fleet ship.”

Jesse smirks but it feels forced. “Bow to my superiority.”

The door slams open and Beca wrestles her way over the threshold, cursing under her breath. Their apartment is a little bigger since Benji moved into his own place, but Beca is carrying so much that she knocks into everything. Jesse, dutifully, gets up and tries to take some of the things from her, to ease the load.

“Don’t touch it,” she snaps, pulling a tote bag out of his hands. He hasn’t seen it since their first year together at Barden and when it gapes open, he catches sight of pictures of the Bellas, all hanging off each other with tired, wide smiles on their faces.

“You should hang that up,” he mentions.

Beca frowns down at the bag and then up at him. “No.”

“Bec-“

“I said no,” she says, nodding at Benji in the living room.

“But it’s from the night of our first kiss,” he presses. “It’s got sentimental value.”

She turns on him, her eyes dark and narrowed. “I said no, Jesse. Leave it.” Beca pushes past him and into the study, slamming the door again.

Jesse takes a deep breath before he turns around, his shoulders up around his ears as he shrugs.

Benji, sitting wide-eyed and cross-legged on his living room floor, stares at him until Jesse shifts, uncomfortable with the attempt. Then, just as Jesse is about to make some kind of joke, Benji shakes his head and sighs. “Chicks, man.”

Jesse laughs so hard there’s tears in his eyes. “Chicks,” he echoes. Like Benji would know.

He lets Benji win this round. It’s what the good guys would do.

*

Chloe calls on a Thursday.

It’s weird, but he recognizes her voice when she calls. He picks up in the middle of an Aerosmith air guitar concert, his “Kiss the Cook” apron covered in batter that should look more like pancakes and less like paint thinner and she only says “hello,” but right away, he knows who it is.

It’s been so long that he actually shouts her name back at her, grinning. Beca, on the couch, turns so quickly, he feels his neck twinge just watching her.

“How it’s going?” he asks, pressing the handheld against his shoulder with his ear. He stirs the batter and wonders if he should add more flour. Beca climbs over the back of the couch, still not blinking.

“Uh, good. Thanks.” Chloe sounds more reserved than usual, but who is he to say? She was always Beca’s friend and that meant they were usually lumped together in a group, but he can count the number of one-on-one conversations they’ve had on one hand. Still, he thinks it’s sweet she’s calling, probably to wish them congratulations on graduating.

“Great,” he says. “That’s great.” He suddenly realizes that Beca is just staring at him. “Oh, sorry. Did you want to talk to Beca?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, just leans forward so she can take the phone from him.

When Beca disappears into the bedroom, Jesse turns Aerosmith back up a little and continues to rock out.

He ends up burning the pancakes, but Beca doesn’t even come out of their room until dinner, so he orders a pizza and pretends like he can’t see that Beca was crying.

*

If he thought it might be over before, it’s definitely heading towards over now.

Chloe calls regularly now and Jesse watches the way that Beca smiles a little brighter each time the phone rings. At first, he chalks it up to time. If he counts correctly, it’s been almost two and a half years, since Beca showed up that night and he’s not sure they’ve talked since then. So, they’ve got a lot to catch up. He gets it. He’s got Benji and when Chloe left, so did a part of Beca. Even he could see that much.

And now that Chloe’s back in the picture, Beca smiles a little bit more. It’s like watching Sleeping Beauty wake back up, if he wants to take it that far. Every time Beca smiles, Jesse can’t help but smile back.

For a moment, before he thinks it’s headed towards over, he thinks it’s getting better.

Beca smiled like that before, at Barden, and Jesse has been desperately trying to find a way to get that back. That smile, that feeling, that moment they had when everything was good and bright and shiny and he was just so happy to be kissing her.

Now, that smile is rising out of the dust like a revived keyboard, like Han Solo out of the carbonate. There’s hope and a surge of something that makes Jesse feel like he could fly, if he wanted to.

Happy endings exist. He’s sure of it.

He’s so sure of it, until he comes home from a night out with Benji – the graduation fun is never-ending – and Chloe is in his living room.

She turns at the sound of the door opening and he instantly sobers. He grins at her, a part of him happy that she’s here, so she can see – _look_ , _we lasted,_ he wants to say, _through your fight and through internships and to graduation_ – but another, louder part of him is telling him he needs to pull himself together; that tonight was a bad idea for a fourth beer.

“Chloe, what-“

Beca pulls up short in the living room, almost as if she’s surprised to see him.

She might be. Jesse remembers something about saying he was probably going to crash at Benji’s for the night.

“Hey,” she breathes out.

He waves stupidly. “Hey. Chloe’s here.”

Beca gives him that smile again. The ‘leave me alone’ one. “Yeah, I know.”

Jesse is about to tell her that he knows she knows and he’s sorry for stating the obvious but he looks down at his shoes to make sure they’re tied and when he looks back up, he sees that stupid envelope clenched in Beca’s hand. “Hey,” he starts. “What’s…”

Beca starts to chew on her bottom lip and Chloe finds the buttons on her jacket interesting.

“Oh,” he breathes out, like he understands. He doesn’t. He won’t. He won’t for a while. But he says it like he does and he thinks maybe Beca knows the truth.

“Jesse,” Beca starts. “I think we need to talk.”

Jesse tips his head to one side. “What’s the opposite of a fairy tale?” he asks out loud. “Is it a scarytale?” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. That’s a dumb question.”

Beca squeezes by Chloe. “How much did you drink?” she asks. He can hear her actual question, fourth beer aside. She wants to know if he’s too drunk to dump, if he won’t remember being left in the morning and call her, wondering where she is and why all of her shower stuff is missing.

He sits down with a sigh, making it onto the couch without falling. “I’m fine. I am. You’re… You’re not.”

Beca shakes her head. “I’m trying but…”

Jesse shakes his head again, trying to make heads and tails of this. There’s a formula for fairy tales: a princess and a prince and a problem and a solution and true love’s kiss to make everything all better. He thought he had all the parts, but he forgot about the villain, the Evil Queen or the Huntsman or the dragon, lurking in the background, waiting for an opportunity to strike. He looks at Chloe and looks away again. She’s not the villain, he’s sure of it. But he still can’t wrap his head around it. It was supposed to work. They were supposed to get their happy ending.

Beca kneels down in front of him. “Jesse, I wanted this to work for you. So, so badly.”

He thinks that might be it right there. She wanted this to work for _him_. She didn’t want it to work for her or for them. Just for him.

There’s something a little romantic about that, maybe, if he looks close enough.

“Have you been…” Jesse nods in the direction of the ticket, still bunched in Beca’s hand. “Have you been planning this?”

She follows his eyes and stands, sighing. “This ticket is… It’s almost three years old,” she admits. “I never took this trip. I moved in with you.”

Jesse takes in the information and digests it. Beca picked him, the first time. She moved in with him and Chloe moved to Massachusetts alone. It makes his head spin. He turns to Chloe, feeling his stomach twist.

“You two were, uh…?”

Chloe shakes her head violently. “No. No. I swear.”

He nods, as if he’s accepting the apology written all over her face. “I’ve seen this movie,” he manages, practically choking on the words. “The nice guy loses to his girl’s best friend and-and-“

Beca sighs sadly, taking a small step forward. “Jesse, life isn’t made up of movie moments.”

He laughs and hates the way it sounds, so fake and foreign and forced. He wonders how he got this way and knows it’s because of Beca. He went after the one princess who didn’t want to be rescued and he should have known it would be an uphill battle he might not win.

“No. I guess it isn’t.” He shrugs his shoulders, not feeling like himself. “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone, you know.”

“Jesse,” Beca sighs again, taking a larger step forward until she’s got her arms wrapped around his neck, her face wet against his collarbone. “Of course I am.”

*

It takes a little while for him to get over it. Not Beca, so much, as the idea of Beca and the idea of losing what he was sure was a final happy ending, his very own fairy tale story.

A few months after Beca leaves, he breaks the lease on their apartment. There’s a job opening for a small start-up movie production studio near L.A., and they like him. It’s bittersweet, packing up his things. He can’t take the hole in the kitchen plaster or the dent in the bathroom door with him and half of the memories he has here will stay behind.

As he’s taking down the shelving unit next to the TV, he finds a stack of DVDs in the corner of the bottom of the shelf, Chloe’s last name stenciled on the covers. That’s what he overlooked before. He never really noticed that all the movies Beca brought with her had “Beale” scribbled in the top corner. He smiles a little, reading the titles to himself. Adjusting his grip, a CD case slips out from between a battered copy of “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “Dear John.”

Jesse laughs without thinking about it, taking in Beca’s chicken scratch before he reads the case.

“Beca and Jesse’s Totally Awesome But Not A Love Story Mix Tape” it says, starting in all capitals and ending up as tiny, barely legible letters near the bottom where Beca tried to squeeze it all in. He turns it over, scanning the song choices and laughing even louder at each one.

From that song Beca played on cups at her audition to Benji’s surprisingly amazing solo, it’s every song that ever meant something to them. Plugging the stereo back into the wall, he puts the CD in and lays down on the living room floor, stretching his neck back until he can see into the kitchen. There, on the refrigerator, upside down from this spot, is the Christmas card Beca sent him, with a picture of Beca and Chloe together, pressed in as tightly as they can so they both fit in the frame, though the corner of Beca’s smile disappeared out of sight.

He thinks about Beca, about how he was supposed to be her happy ending and he was supposed to be hers.

He thinks that, maybe, if he tells their story in reverse, up until that first kiss, it could be. It could be a story where the guy gets the girl and when they kiss at the end, it fades to black, solidifying them in a moment they will never have to forget, a moment they will never have to try and be better than they were at the time.

Jesse looks at Beca’s picture again, at the smile on her face and the way Chloe’s eyes are so bright even from this distance. He lets his gaze drift across the fridge door, finding the business card Beca sent with Aubrey’s number on it, in case he wants to know someone when he moves to L.A 

Maybe, _maybe_ he doesn’t need to tell their story in reverse for it to be happy.

 

Maybe they’ll both end up happy even without each other.

 

The CD queues up and he smiles when he hears the sound of someone tapping on solo cups.


End file.
